Feed to Facebook

In late October, Forrester Research released a seven page report for interactive marketing professionals titled “What’s Holding RSS Back? Cosumers Still Don’t Understand This Really Simple Technology,” by Julie M. Katz and fellow researchers. According to the report, “Nearly half of interactive marketers use RSS [Really Simple Syndication], but consumer adoption has only reached 11 percent. Of the consumers who haven’t adopted RSS, most don’t understand how RSS is relevant to their lives and the way they seek information.” This does not bode well for marketers who rely on content syndication to reach consumers—to succeed they may have to step up to the plate and spend some time educating their audience.

According to the Wikipedia article, RSS has been around since the mid- to late-90s, gaining speed around 2002. The benefits of subscribing to RSS feeds is that it allows you, the consumer, to receive the updates to all the blogs, online publications, etc that you want to keep up with in one place. That cuts down on all the URLs you need to have bookmarked, or trying to keep track of who updates when. You let RSS take care of all of that.

Hopefully you’ve subscribed to our RSS feed, and if not, I’ll walk you through the steps—trust me it’s easy!

Scroll to the bottom of the page.

Click on the “RSS” in the phrase “Syndicate entries using RSS”

Select how you want to subscribe to our feed—it automatically gives you the option of Live Bookmarks, which I prefer.

Hit the “subscribe now” button, and you’re set!

Now you’ve become part of the 11 percent of consumers that understand and use RSS. Hopefully we can push that percent a bit higher.